On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:03:16 PST
"Richard L. Hamilton" <rlhamil at smart.net> wrote:
> None of which should discourage you from going there, if you know you
> have a really good reason; the more that learn to, the better. But it's
> probably more effort for less situations where it's necessary, so I don't
> know that I'd suggest going there just for curiosity or the notion that
> source is more trustworthy than verifiably unaltered binaries from
> someone with a good reputation.
Part of the sales pitch for open source is that, given the source, you
can always modify it yourself - or pay someone else to do it - no
matter what happens to the folks who own it, or what they may want it
to do. While that's great in theory, this is the kind of theory that
it's nice to test in practice every once and a while, just to show
that the theory actually works. Sort of like pulling a random file off
of backups, just to check that the you really can restore files from a
backup.
Given ON's history, it's not surprising it doesn't have simple targets
like the stuff that's been open longer. IIRC, the BSD tapes didn't
have those targets on them, either - except for maybe the last one,
which came out after the open source BSDs had been around for a while.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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